"Wheeler's Anonymous"

Another day of maintanance and no wheeling... Fixing folded cam tab, broken misalignment spacer, bed stiffener getting installed, replacing UCA uniballs. Hoping today's efforts fix all the squeaking and rattling so I can beat this thing up in JT next weekend.
Big thanks to @glorifiedwelder for helping me find these issues.

 

Jt= Joshua tree? There's wheeling there?

 

Yes. Tons of it. I will tag you in the trip thread.

 

Nothing hard. Just a bunch of awesome fire roads with whoops and such.

 

By the way, I finally found a shop that can handle mid and long travel alignments. Northridge tirepros. 8765 Reseda, Northridge 91325. Talk to Roy, general manager, and he will assign his tech Jesus to do it. He was been aligning and installing lift kits and long travel on trucks for over 15 years. It took him 25 minutes and a test drive around the block and it was done. He nailed it. The truck is dialed and driving great.

$130 Plus 6k mile warranty. I hinted to them that I "may" use the truck for rock crawling and beat the shit out of it - their response was to just not tell them and they will honor it.

Pic of final specs:

 

It's always a nasty curb (mall parking is brutal) that kills the alignment.... never ever a rock. Lol

 

Lol. I'm sure the will even honor mall crawling. Which is what we all do anyways.

 

Let me know if you rub that fire wall turning under compression. I rub with castor below 2.8. But haven't been aligned properly since before my dirt king lowers. Wondering if they help push tire forward..?

 

I hit up Firestone once a month for 5 months taking advantage of the lifetime alignment I bought...but they are hit or miss with lifted trucks depending on which one you go to.

 

I'll let you know, but I don't think I'll be rubbing anything until I get my 35's back on.....

Pic for reference and embarrassment... long story short, new tires are at my place in Utah and I had this set laying around the shop.

 

Ahh I thought there might actually be some crawling and stuff. Not much of a fire road fan lol

 

Ideally you want the caster as close to 4* as you can get it on a midtravel setup

 

I don't know shit about alignments... is it possible to get that much caster and st, keep everything else in spec around it?

 

On 9 out of 10 trucks with a good alignment guy it is possible. The tough part is getting the alignment guy to mess with everything long enough to get those numbers. Every time you adjust one adjustment point on the lca or tie rods the other points need to be changed. Most guys just get everything in spec and call it good. I've seen the guy I use spend as long as 3 hours going back and forth moving stuff around to the specs I wanted on my front end. But I have yet to see a truck he couldn't get to a minimum of 3.75* caster.

Edit:actually I take that back. Their was a 2016 he couldn't get past 2.4 but that was because it had a bent spindle. We swapped out spindles and he was at 4*

 

Damn you're making me feel like a bum. I need to knock out some of the maintanence shit on my own truck

 

Well that answers that. I'll see how my truck rides out in Colorado in a few weeks. If it's still giving me tons of rub, I'll have to go see your alignment guy. Thanks for the info.

 

If you aren't rubbing you'll be good. But if you are I'd just ask the guys that did it if they can adjust the caster. I usually tell the alignment guy what my goal numbers are prior to them doing the alignment. I think if they know you have expectations above just the standard alignment they will work a little harder to get the alignment exactly where you want it

 

Gonna have to talk to the guy I went to last time at firestone. He seemed like a good dude. Has a jeep and crawls it. We bull shitted a bit when I was in last time. I'm due for an alignment. You say caster to 4* right?

 

Yeah as close to 4 as you can get it. It's not really that critical until you start running 35's then it's almost necessary on 2nd and 3rd gens

 

The specs Kyle posted are what you want for 33s. Castor 3+ is for the big boys